How Two Outcast Rappers Built an Insane Clown Empire

Violent J wants to play me a song.

It’s a late-summer evening in suburban Detroit, and J—whose real name is Joseph Bruce—is unwinding in his home studio, a compact yet neatly kept space decorated with wrestling belts and posters of Eazy-E and Michael Jackson. As one-half of the white-rap duo Insane Clown Posse, Bruce, a roly-poly 38-year-old, has recorded or produced hundreds of songs here. But this one, he says, is a favorite.

“Do you know who Color Me Badd is?” he asks in his sleepy-bulldog voice, a lit blunt jutting from his mouth. “They were the shit. We did a song with their lead singer.” He cues up 2007’s “Truth Dare,” a thumping, midtempo number that sounds a bit like a nursery rhyme sing-along, complete with playground taunts:

I double-dare you: Swallow every pill in the bottle.

I double-dare you: Tongue-kiss a toilet seat at McDonald’s.

I double-dare you: Dig up a body and take it home.

Give it a sponge bath, and do what you want with it.

As the track plays, Bruce’s musical partner and childhood friend, Joey Utsler (aka Shaggy 2 Dope), sits quietly to the side, nodding and rubbing the gothic D tattooed on the back of his shaved head. Utsler is 36 and lean, with talon-sharp fingernails and the sandpapery voice of a lifelong smoker. He tends to be more voluble than Bruce, who’s pausing the song every few seconds, explaining how he paid Bryan Abrams—the R&B smoothie behind such ’90s hits as “I Wanna Sex You Up”—a mere $10,000 to guest on the track. The two men have even been talking about signing Abrams to ICP’s Psychopathic Records, a label better known for makeup-wearing, murder-obsessed rappers than for preening lovermen.

The song ends, and Bruce beams in his chair. For an ode to hygienic necrophilia, “Truth Dare” is surprisingly hummable. It might even be one of Insane Clown Posse’s best songs. Of course, that’s not saying much, seeing how ICP’s discography comprises some of the most profoundly vile music ever made. In the two decades since Bruce and Utsler formed the group, they’ve churned out more than a dozen albums’ worth of gleefully misogynist, cartoonishly violent songs. In ICP’s world, rednecks are carved up and eaten (“Chicken Huntin'”), pedophiles are stabbed in the colon (“To Catch a Predator”), and STDs get their own anthems (“Bugz on My Nugz,” which is performed, in part, in the imagined style of high-pitched venereal crabs). “Our shit is definitely male-oriented,” Bruce says.

The ICP aesthetic is a below-brow mix of Tales from the Crypt comics gore and puerile shock-jockery. It’s most proudly displayed during the group’s live act, in which Bruce and Utsler—both of whom hail from the suburbs—disguise themselves with black and white clown makeup and throw gangsta leans while dousing their audiences with sticky geysers of Faygo, a midwestern econo-buy soda. Not surprisingly, the music industry has long treated ICP with the sort of wary contempt with which one would eye a Chinese battery landfill. Radio stations and MTV mostly refuse to play the band, while critics have declared ICP the worst act in music (Blender) and dismissed the group as a modern-day minstrel act (Spin). And though ICP has been signed to major labels several times, each deal has collapsed.

For years, ICP operated on the fringes of the record business, selling just enough discs to get the media’s attention, however unfavorable. But by the early ’00s, with Eminem and Saw-style torture-porn movies making millions, ICP’s face-painted crudity no longer seemed outrè9. For a good decade or so, most of the mainstream world basically stopped paying attention to Insane Clown Posse, and the group went underground.

That is, until last spring, when the men behind ICP did something so strange, so offensive, the rest of the world couldn’t help but take notice: They got deep.

In April, the group released a music video for a piano-plinking, synth-heavy song called “Miracles.” In the clip, Bruce and Utsler, dressed all in white, cavort in front of a series of epic, if poorly done greenscreen backdrops—the pyramids, outer space, a giant telescope. Lyrically, there’s not a single chopped-up hillbilly or chatty STD to be found; instead, the group praises the mysteries of earth, from the sun to Niagara Falls to giraffes. The song’s best-known lines appear just shy of the two-minute mark: Water, fire, air, and dirt / Fuckin’ magnets—how do they work? The clip was an immediate web sensation, mocked on Videogum and Gawker, lampooned in The New York Times, and eventually spoofed on Saturday Night Live. Though Bruce and Utsler had conceived “Miracles” as an earnest and fairly straightforward ode to the natural world, blog commentators and YouTube pundits were unsure of the song’s meaning: Did these guys really not know how magnetism works? (Answer: They do.) Why do they view rivers and giraffes with such f-bombing fascination? (Because giraffes are cool.) And, most important: Is this all one big joke? (Definitely not.)

The attention lavished on “Miracles” was largely negative, but it was enough to propel ICP up from the underground—and the duo didn’t come alone. Over the past decade, Bruce and Utsler have quietly built a massive pop-culture sleeper cell of fans, who call themselves the Juggalos (so named for a 1992 ICP song, “The Juggla”). While most of us happily ignored ICP, the Juggalos embraced the band’s outsider status, helping albums like 2009’s Bang! Pow! Boom! debut at number four on the Billboard charts. Over the years, in fact, ICP has sold a respectable 7 million albums. And that’s just the beginning. Juggalos also flock to ICP’s long-running online store, which sells everything from action figures to baby gear to an energy drink, Spazmatic. There are ICP movies, radio shows, and an annual music-festival-slash-brand-enhancer, the Gathering of the Juggalos. A recent Nightline segment estimated that Psychopathic has revenue of $10 million a year, and while Bruce disputes the figure, he owns four homes in Detroit and has already saved up enough to pay the college tabs for his two kids, ages 3 and 5.

The uproar over “Miracles” only increased the devotion of ICP’s fans. The group long ago developed a sort of symbiotic relationship with the outside world: The more Bruce and Utsler are shunted to the margins—whether by critics, labels, or kvetchy bloggers—the more their outcast fans love them. No wonder the group sells T-shirts decreeing itself
“The Most Hated Band in the World!” In the weeks after I meet with the pair, they’ll travel to promote Big Money Rustlas, their $1.5 million comedy-western DVD; coordinate with the folks at Guinness about setting a world record for battle-royal wrestling (both are huge wrestling fans); and even take a meeting with VH1 about a possible show. “They wanna see what we’re all about,” Bruce says.

While the record industry has haplessly searched for a new business model, Insane Clown Posse has built a veritable empire. Many of ICP’s wisest moves were things that once looked like career killers: hanging out with fans while snubbing industry types, starting a niche music festival in the middle of nowhere, and, in Bruce’s case, writing a lengthy, soul-baring memoir filled with unpleasant details called Behind the Paint. Long before MySpace and Twitter allowed artists to communicate quasi intimately with their fan base and “transparency” had become a marketing strategy, ICP had already erased the barrier between performer and audience.

In doing so, Bruce and Utsler discovered a formula for success in the Internet age that the larger music world is only now waking up to: Build close relationships with fans, develop ancillary profit streams, keep production and promotion costs down, turn every concert and album into an event (even if that requires industrial soda sprayers), and, most of all, do everything yourself. Bruce and Utsler, in other words, have become two bona fide 21st-century music magnates.

Fuckin’ magnates. How did that work?

Psychopathic Records’ headquarters is located in an industrial suburban neighborhood just off Detroit’s Nine Mile Road, surrounded by strip malls, warehouses, and a Montessori school. The interior looks like a late -’70s porn set—deep blue wall-to-wall carpeting, chocolate brown decor, a minimum of natural light—and the hallways are covered with posters and cardboard cutouts featuring other ICP acts, each with its own backstory and aesthetic, from serial-killer rap (Twiztid) to gangsta- zombie rap (Blaze Ya Dead Homie) to southern-gothic rap (Boondox).

On the afternoon I arrive, Bruce gives me a tour of the facilities dressed in a red jersey, denim shorts, and a thick necklace featuring the Hatchetman, the group’s cleaver-wielding logo. Without the clown makeup, his facial scruff and sunken eyes are more pronounced.

ICP has had little contact with the corporate music world since it set up this nerve center. With the exception of physical distribution, everything’s done in-house by a staff of about 30 full-time employees. There’s the 6,200-square-foot warehouse; an Internet-radio station, W-FUCKOFF; a recording studio; and a setup for video shoots and concert rehearsals (all of the resources are shared by the Psychopathic roster, which consists of more than a dozen artists on two labels). A second warehouse, located just a short drive away, manufactures hats, belts, shirts, stickers, onesies, and all manner of other gear, though half the building will soon be turned over to a new wrestling school Bruce and Utsler are cofounding.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in Psychopathic HQ is the number of gold and platinum albums hanging on the walls. Even in the era of illegal downloads, ICP’s fans still buy physical discs, which are stacked around the warehouse. This is partly because the CD packages are jammed with swag, like 3-D glasses and decoding devices. But it’s also because ICP has made its albums must-haves for fans by weaving everything from the lyrics to the liner notes into a sprawling, wiki-ready supernatural epic called the Dark Carnival. It’s like the Lost universe, only with organ music and evil jugglers.

A convoluted morality tale that purports to document (and punish) mankind’s basest desires, the Dark Carnival forms the crux of ICP’s comic book mythology. Its origins can be traced to an incident that befell Bruce in the early ’90s, a story he relates in Behind the Paint. According to Bruce, who says he’s experienced several otherworldly visions in his life, a “dark shadow” appeared in the hall outside his room one night. After dropping a series of cards, the figure transported Bruce to a late-night carnival. Inspired by the encounter, ICP announced it would release six “Joker’s Card” albums, each one spotlighting a different carnival character.

For newcomers, divining the specifics of the Dark Carnival plot can be tricky: The music rarely strays from ICP’s worn formula of righteous violence and sixth-grade sex brags, and whatever plot points these songs contain are either dog-whistle faint or nonexistent. Yet the Carnival’s inscrutability has only drawn fans deeper, and its long-form arc was seemingly made for the Internet, where Juggalos devote entire websites to the Dark Carnival, looking for clues in ICP’s steady stream of blog posts. Whether one sees the Carnival as a feat of proto-21st-century storytelling or simply a long-con gimmick—in truth it’s probably both—it’s proven to be an inexhaustible franchise. To Juggalos, the Carnival’s cartoon mascots are as iconic as the Grateful Dead’s dancing bears or Iron Maiden’s Eddie, and they’re emblazoned on everything from ski masks to lighters (of course, even the Greatful Dead and Iron Maiden don’t have anything like the ICP Dark Carnival-themed board game The Quest for Shangri-La). Not surprisingly, after the first series of cards was exhausted—a process that took six albums and 10 years—ICP announced the beginning of a second Joker’s Deck.

For those who’d been paying attention to the Dark Carnival all along, the thinly veiled spirituality of “Miracles” made perfect sense. On “Thy Unveiling,” a song from 2002’s The Wraith: Shangri-La, ICP revealed that the Dark Carnival—much like Lost—was all about finding heaven: Truth is we follow God. / We’ve always been behind Him. / The Carnival is God, and may all Juggalos find Him! “I was raised to believe there was a God, a heaven, and a hell,” Bruce says. “We got the ears of all these Juggalos. What do we want to say? We wanna say, ‘Go to heaven. Don’t fuck up.’ I wanna see Juggalos in the afterlife.”

The more Utsler (left) and Bruce are shunted to the margins, the more their misfit fans love them.Photo: Brent Humphreys

The aptly named Lake Hepatitis.Photo: Brent Humphreys

To get an idea of what Juggalo heaven would look like, you must burrow through deep woods to an isolated campground at Cave-In Rock, an aptly named village near the Illinois-Kentucky border. After several long, desolate stretches of road, all tethers to the outside world start to break away: Cell phone bars shrivel to mere nubs, like an unfinished game of hangman. Luckily, to find the Gathering of the Juggalos, all you need to do is listen for the whoops. They can be heard from the edges of the campsite and come in three varieties:

“Whoop-whoooooUP!” The longest, most celebratory whoop heard at the Gathering, often performed en masse. It usually denotes a special occasion, such as a Psychopathic artist walking through the crowd or a woman removing her top.

“Whoop-Whoop!” The most common whoop, one heard frequently as Juggalos pass one another in large groups on foot or in rented go-carts.

“Whoopwhoop.” A slightly less enthused-sounding whoop, its force hampered by the effects of drowsiness, sunstroke, or weed.

Despite the constant auditory stimuli, the Gathering is, in some ways, aggressively mellow. This is a bit of a revelation, given that an ICP-sponsored documentary, A Family Underground, portrays the event as a cavalcade of backyard wrestling brawls and partial nudity. These do exist, as does an open narcotics market, called the Bridge, where revelers peddle everything from pot to ecstasy to coke (the park is private property, so no cops are allowed). And things get more ominous at night, when the combination of drugs, face paint, and rented wheels turns the Gathering of the Juggalos into something resembling a Cormac McCarthy-designed game of Mario Kart.

But at times the event is downright family-friendly. During the day, Bruce emcees a Beach Boys-themed dance party. Entire families line up to get ICP jerseys (and even pregnant bellies) signed at the autograph tent, while Juggalos cavort on a dock atop a body of water so nasty-looking that it’s been dubbed Lake Hepatitis. And of course there’s the music, with artists like Naughty by Nature and Warren G (plus the occasional throwback like Vanilla Ice or stand-up comic Gallagher) performing late into the night. And if you get bored, you can always look for the kid with the sign that reads “Will Eat Bugs for $.”

Despite a sizable population of female fans (dubbed Juggalettes), ICP’s following is made up mostly of young white men from working-class backgrounds. They tend to feel that they’ve been misunderstood outsiders their whole lives, whether for being overweight, looking weird, being poor, or even for just liking ICP in the first place. It’s a world where man boobs are on proud display, where long-hairs and pink-hairs mingle, where nobody makes fun of the fat kid toweling off near Lake Hepatitis. For them, the Gathering is a place they can be accepted, a feeling reinforced by the constant chants of the Juggalo credo “Fam-uh-LEE! Fam-uh-LEE!” “You’re surrounded by people who love you,” says Corey Lewter, a 23-year-old from Algonquin, Illinois. “Even though we’ve never met each other, we all relate.” Adds Nick Wolff, a 20-year-old prep cook from Willowbrook, Illinois, “We’re all family, no matter what race, color, weight, whatever.”

Like most Juggalos, Wolff and Lewter began listening to ICP as teenagers, and anyone perplexed by the band’s continued success would do well to recall just how alienating those years can be. Bruce and Utsler haven’t forgotten this pain. Though the Gathering hosts a massive merch tent—complete with $350 leather jackets and an on-site ATM—the group is really selling an off-the-rack social identity: instant entrée to a band of outsiders. It’s an image ICP pushes constantly, pimping otherness with its “Most Hated Band” T-shirts and middle-of-nowhere confab, and it’s undoubtedly the single biggest factor in ICP’s success. With so many artists pitching a lifestyle of aspirational fabulosity, ICP extols the virtue of average-shmo egalitarianism, even if the actual ICP members don’t live an entirely down-and-out life these days.

Put all of these outsiders together with a heaping dose of us-versus-them and you have a tried-and-true formula for creating an insular subculture—just ask any tea-partyer. And at the Gathering there really is a sense of unity. Until there isn’t.

Late on the second night of the festival, reality TV star Tila Tequila makes an appearance on the Gathering’s “Ladies’ Night” stage. Throughout the day, there were rumors that Tequila was going to be attacked by the crowd—despite Bruce and Utsler asking everyone to leave her alone. Yet within minutes of taking the stage, Tequila is pelted with debris, chairs, and even feces from an outhouse. She removes her top, hoping to win over the crowd, but is forced, after being bloodied, into a retreat. The event played out on TMZ and MTV for days.

Why was Tequila persecuted while the likes of Vanilla Ice were cheered? It’s hard to say. Some claim Tequila was mocking ICP on her Twitter feed by spelling clown with a k. Others see her presence as evidence that the mainstream—after years of not caring about what the Juggalos did out here in the woods—is intruding upon the Gathering, either to poke fun at it or to figure out how to market to it. But the truth is, for the ICP formula to work there has to be a “them”—and in this case, them is an admittedly grating (but thoroughly harmless) publicity seeker, one who maybe acts a little too much like the girl who wouldn’t date you in high school.

The incident presents an interesting dilemma for ICP, especially as its profile increases: The Gathering is intended as an open-tent party; in fact, that all-inclusiveness might be its biggest draw, greater even than the music and the drugs. So what happens when the crowd gets too unruly? If Bruce and Utsler start telling Juggalos what they can and can’t do, they risk coming off like just another set of uncaring adults. Bruce waves off such concerns. Just because he and Utsler created the Juggalos doesn’t mean they have the power to control them. “We don’t lead them,” Bruce says. “Juggalos lead us.”

Pole dancing at this year's Gathering of the Juggalos.Photo: Brent Humphreys

Two weeks after the Gathering, Bruce is guiding his black SUV through downtown Detroit, pointing out sites from ICP’s history. We pass through the city’s southwest neighborhoods, where ICP—then called Inner City Posse—got its start in the early ’90s. With each block, the urban landscape becomes more grim: A brand-new chain pharmacy gives way to homes that have been hollowed out by fire, leaving behind nothing but piles of rubble and a few brick walls. As we drive, rare Michael Jackson ballads trickle from Bruce’s car stereo, part of his massive MJ archive.

We eventually end up at the entrance to Zug Island, an industrial atoll in the middle of the Detroit River owned and operated by US Steel. There’s a “No Trespassing” sign on the bridge, but we cross it without trouble, arriving at an acrid-smelling stretch of land with dunes of coal and twisted metal intestines that stretch across a skyline of egg-white smoke. This is the place ICP calls home, even though Bruce and Utsler didn’t grow up here.

They met as teenagers in the surrounding suburbs. Both had difficult upbringings, and their fathers left their family when they were young. “Every night was a fuckin’ party,” Utsler says of his childhood. “Drinkin, smokin’ weed. It turned out to fuck me up in the long run.” A recovering alcoholic and drug addict, he’s been in and out of trouble ever since (he recently beat a rap for a concealed-weapons charge). Bruce’s childhood was arguably worse. In Behind the Paint, he details how his father left with his family’s money, forcing them to subsist on welfare. He and his siblings were then sexually abused by their first stepfather.

After becoming friends, Bruce and Utsler would come to Southwest Detroit to hang out, eventually moving here after dropping out of high school. Though they dreamed of becoming pro wrestlers, they soon took up rapping, using a boom box to record their earliest songs, which were heavily indebted to the slinking-bass sound of West Coast gangsta rappers like NWA. Eventually they hit on the idea of wearing clown makeup—inspired by nightmares Bruce used to have about being visited by a scary clown—which helped them stand out in Detroit’s burgeoning rap scene. Few took them seriously. But Bruce and Utsler hustled day and night, putting up flyers throughout Detroit, living out of Kinko’s, and hand-delivering their albums to every store they could. The duo worked with several major labels over the years, but those deals all derailed. So ICP gave up on the established record industry and soldiered on doing everything themselves. Along the way they discovered legions of outsiders and rejects who could relate to a struggling, downtrodden act that the establishment wouldn’t accept.

“We represent those under the underdogs,” Bruce says. “We represent scrubs.” As proof, he motions for Utsler to lift up his shirt, revealing a large stomach tattoo that reads “Scrub Life”, a spoof of Tupac Shakur’s infamous thug-life credo.

ICP’s do-it-yourself ethos is on display in Bruce’s home studio as he and Utsler diligently work on a session with Axe Murder Boyz, two twentysomethings from Denver who are signed to one of Psychopathic’s subsidiary labels. Bruce and Utsler develop their artists personally, often helping to pick names, determine a look, and occasionally cowrite songs. It can be a lengthy process: Perfecting the southern-goth scarecrow look for Boondox, for example, took six months.

Figuring out how to promote Axe Murder Boyz hasn’t been that easy. After at first packaging them as bum-rushing thugs, Bruce is now trying to mold AMB as a sort of Juggalo counterpart to Outkast, with one member dressed in a constantly changing array of tight, colorful vintage shirts, while the other wears more traditional gangsta garb. For an hour, he urges them to just be themselves. Then he suggests they record an elaborate Jerry Springer parody. It’s hard to tell whether the Boyz are quietly mulling over the idea or merely hoping Bruce is so high he’ll forget about the whole thing come morning.

In a few months, ICP will be back in the studio recording the next installment of the second Joker’s Card deck. But before that, the pair plan on using the “Miracles” momentum to push a bunch of new projects. There’s the possible VH1 show, though Bruce is wary of appearing on some Hogan Knows Best-style reality series (“There’s a lot that’s mysterious about us,” he says. “If all of a sudden we were on some stupid reality show, fans would be like, ‘Why have I got these assholes tattooed on my back?'”) Then there’s the wrestling school, which Bruce will use to host free matches. In many ways, it’s the typical Insane Clown Posse endeavor: a counterintuitive, financially iffy brand enhancer that’ll be mocked by critics, loved by fans, and built without any help from the outside. And the merch section will be huge.

“I know for a fact that we’re nowhere near where we’re going,” Bruce says. We’re sitting on the front porch of his house, listening to the midday cicadas. “You believe in The Secret?” he asks referring to the best-selling New Age self-help book. “We’re firm believers in that shit, man. Something big’s gonna happen. We’re so sure of it that if my nuts were in a guillotine right now, I’d bet we haven’t seen our best days.”

A few minutes later, Utsler points up to one of the giant trees over Bruce’s front patio. Way up high, easily 15 feet, a toddler’s plastic car is wedged in the branches. It looks like it was displaced by a hurricane.

“How the fuck did that get up there?” Utsler asks.

Bruce shrugs. Just another miracle.

Contributing editor Brian Raftery (brianraftery@gmail.com) wrote about the Cheezburger Network in issue 18.02.

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